From Gloves to Hands
RED LEADERSHIP PERSPECTIVES
How A Breakthrough Insight Transformed a Medical Device Company
A conversation between
Katriina Öberg, EVP Gloves at Mölnlycke, Casey Dusenbery, R&D Director Gloves at Mölnlycke, and Tamara Moellenberg, Associate Partner and Martin Gronemann, Partner at ReD Associates
INTRODUCTION
Mölnlycke is a world-leading MedTech company that specialises in innovative solutions for wound care and surgical procedures. The company has four business areas: Wound Care, Operation Room Solutions, Gloves, and Antiseptics. Following a 2021 restructuring, the Gloves business area has focused on understanding the relationship between surgical gloves and hand performance, moving beyond traditional safety metrics to consider comfort, fatigue, and long-term career goals. The business area has 2,350 employees and annual sales of €250mn
ABOUT
Katriina Öberg leads Mölnlycke’s Gloves business area which in 2021 became one of their four business areas with end-to-end responsibility to create value for customers. Casey Dusenbery joined as R&D Director during this transformation, and together they reflect on how ethnographic insights provided clarity and momentum for execution.
Part 1:
Setting the Foundation
ReD: What was the situation when you became EVP of the Gloves business area in July 2021?
Katriina: The organisational split had just happened, and we had this opportunity to become a standalone BA with all the possibilities that come with it. This gave us a great opportunity to start thinking outside the box and focus on areas that would be important for us to grow the business. The company had three key strategic priorities: sustainability, digitalisation, and customer centricity. There wasn’t any better way to start laying our strategy than starting from the customer. But it was also interesting because you don’t know where the customer takes you.
ReD: Casey, you joined during this transformation. What did you find when you arrived?
Casey: Before becoming a standalone BA the focus for Gloves was very much on maintaining business continuity and making incremental improvements. There was a small R&D team in Malaysia with people who had extensive expertise in gloves chemistry and processing, but the emphasis was primarily on operational excellence rather than innovation.
“ The biggest insight was realising we shouldn’t be talking about gloves at all – we should be talking about hands. This focus on hands solved our value proposition challenge.”
Part 2:
A Customer-First Approach to Strategy
ReD: How did our ethnographic approach feel different from traditional approaches to strategy development?
Katriina: This methodology was different from what we have done before but we knew we needed to trust the process and trust the answers. When doctors received our request for interview, they’d ask, “Why did you reserve one hour for me to talk about gloves? I don’t have anything to say.” It turned out that 60 minutes was actually not enough because people started to tell their stories, their everyday struggles, and what gloves could potentially help with. The story started moving from being very technical – what type of material, straight or curved fingers – towards very emotional: “It really ruined my day” or “It really saved my day.” They started talking about burns from devices, cuts from different equipment, shear friction – a whole plethora of moments of irritation and frustration. Had we gone in only talking about puncture indication, we would have heard puncture indication back, but we would have missed all these other problems.
Part 3:
The Breakthrough Insight
ReD: What was the key insight that emerged from the research?
Katriina: The biggest insight was realising we shouldn’t be talking about gloves at all – we should be talking about hands. This focus on hands solved our value proposition challenge. Most importantly, focusing on hands opened up a whole world of problems we’d never seen before – burns, cuts, friction, fatigue – not just puncture indication.
Casey: From an R&D perspective, focusing on hands was fascinating because hands are incredibly complex – they have 27 bones, intricate muscle systems, and perform thousands of precise movements during surgery. When you study gloves in isolation, you’re limited to material properties and basic protection. But when you study hands, you discover ergonomics, fatigue patterns, dexterity requirements, and sensory feedback needs. It’s a much richer problem space with far more opportunities for meaningful innovation.
“The customer insights became our foundation for making fast, confident investment decisions.The customer feedback became ‘the law’.”
Part 4:
Transformation and Impact
ReD: How did the ‘Hands Deserve Better’ value proposition help you as a leader align and mobilise your organisation?
Katriina: We’re here to make hands work better – our purpose is to improve hand performance. This became a true purpose for the entire organisation. The customer insights became our foundation for making fast, confident investment decisions. Instead of endless discussions, we could go to the Gloves leadership team and decide what we were going to do and feel very comfortable. The customer feedback became ‘the law’ – I could always say, “If you have better customer feedback, we’ll listen, otherwise this is it.” It gave us authority to prioritise investments around ‘Hands Deserve Better’. Now we have eight customer-tested concepts in our pipeline, all guided by these insights.
ReD: What specific changes has this approach driven in your business?
Casey: We have a really robust, stratified roadmap now. We also developed a hand measuring device because fit is so foundational. It gave our R&D team human hand measurements for when we produce the next glove, but it also gave us a two-minute moment to sit with surgeons and talk about hand sizing and fit. The big shift in R&D has been to think not just two-, but three-dimensionally. We used to think about gloves as this flat, elastic product. Now we start talking about how the glove fits the hands, how movement works, what motions surgeons make the most during the day, what motions make them most tired or cause issues. This shift has made us think about who we hire, how we test, how we develop, what digital tools we want, and how we innovate. We hired people from outside MedTech – for example someone from the car industry who worked on ergonomics, looking at button placement and force requirements. We brought in expertise we’d never even considered before.
Katriina: We also supported the development of the world’s first consensus document on surgical glove use with 13 world-leading surgeons. We talked about fit, hand fatigue, and performance – all built on our customer insights. This became our evidence foundation. In terms of mobilisation, we immediately rolled out “Champions Education” – everybody working with gloves in our BA had to take training that associated gloves with hand performance, fatigue, and fit in ways we’d never done before, to make sure our new value proposition gets executed in every function.
Part 5:
The Power of Customer-Grounded Strategy
ReD: How has this customer-grounded approach empowered you as leaders?
Katriina: You move people with convincing stories, and you need authenticity and passion to get people to buy in. This work gave us the fundamental strength and concrete foundation to stand on and tell the story with authenticity, power, and force. It’s not just about the story – it’s the insight and learning, the sweat and tears behind that story. For many people, gloves are a commodity. So how are you going to be different when your price is higher? You need to have the depth of understanding that comes from this type of work.
Casey: The process we went through internally where we had everybody’s perspectives with the customer in the centre led us to make believers out of people who were initially sceptical. Having that base of information that came directly from customers and being able to access it whenever we need to check our direction – that’s been invaluable.
Three recommendations for leaders
1. Trust the process and embrace uncertainty:
Replace confirmation-seeking research with genuine open-ended inquiry, accepting the discomfort of not controlling outcomes. Use multiple methodologies – interviews, surveys, observations – to validate findings across different customer sources.
2. Transform insights into organisational authority:
Make customer feedback your ultimate decision-making authority. Create simple, memorable purpose statements and use clarity for rapid, confident leadership decisions.
3. Embed customer truth throughout the organisation:
Involve multiple teams in research so insights become organisationally owned, not mandated from above.
